19 responses

Where to start……… this video states something about “finishing in 8 years”, and we don’t have eight years……. Peak everything has ALREADY begun.

And then there’s the ticklish issue of where will the money come from…? or the Hydrogen for that matter…. if we’re going to feed a 42 hectare fusion power plant Hydrogen (to fuse into Helium), we are going to need shedloads of the stuff, on a CONTINUOUS basis. Or am I missing something?

Then there’s the other issue of the amount of damage we’ve already caused the planet with LIMITED energy. If we actually had unlimited amounts of the stuff, what state will we live the Earth in?

Wanderer
This technology has been the most glutonous one of any technology, with regard to money, over many decades and has failed to produce any usable energy. But just supposing it succeded in producing the promised bonanza, it can only operate as gigantic installations thus reinforcing the centralization that the matrix thrives on. If you meant an escape route from the matrix, I think not.

That having been said why can so many of us human beings think only on one line of thought at a time and some only ever on one line of thought. Electricity is one form of energy (not a very portable one) but the prime energy at present in our system is oil. But oil is only one of the many resources that we are running out of. Fusion would only solve one part of one of our problems and nothing of the others.

Thank you for that Sandra…… the presentation Leo linked to came out weird with all the text sliding off the page to the right……..

12082013

Lois Achimovich(15:59:42) :

Terrific article. Thanks Leo for putting me onto it. Highly relevant to the piece in The Conversation from Chris Dunstan on the Electricity Wars.Thanks to Dr Michaux for making peak oil and end of mining understandable for lay people
Lois A.

I find my alarm over peak oil fades with time, and with the lack of visual evidence. But this video lit (another) fire under my butt to get moving and prepare for big changes. I think a lot of us have distanced ourselves from the ‘doomer’ or ‘prepper’ labels and language because those have been made to look silly. But, really, what’s a more appropriate viewpoint and response when confronted with the facts of the situation?

1. Peak uranium? When today’s waste could run the world for 500 years? Tell him he’s dreaming.
“ Barry Brook:…. So instead of getting less than 1% of the energy out of uranium, these fast reactors get about 99.8% of the energy out of it which means they’re incredibly more efficient in terms of using the uranium resource. And actually we’ve mined enough uranium already to run the whole world in these reactors for about 500 years.

Robyn Williams: So the old argument about running out of uranium isn’t on any more?

2. It takes for or 5 years to build a nuke? Nukes are too expensive, who is going to pay for them? Both of these arguments are related, and both are baloney. It’s like condemning the airline industry because the Hindenberg exploded.

How long does it take to make a car, or how much does a car cost? It depends. Are we talking about a one-of-a-kind hand crafted Bentley classic, or an off the production line Hyundai? Today’s nukes can be modularised and put up on the production line. They can then be trucked to site and clipped together like so much super-sized lego. It’s just plain disingenuous to rely on the too long’ or ‘too expensive’ arguments. It does not have to be that way.

3. Spent fuel rods? Are you SERIOUS! This guy has NO IDEA what he’s talking about. The fuel can be reprocessed in an INTEGRATED Fast Reactor, and just today’s nuclear waste is worth $30 TRILLION dollars as a resource because it could run the world for 5 centuries. So we’re just going to *store* these ‘spent fuel rods’? That would be like digging up your best sweet oil, refining it into petroleum, and then burying it somewhere for decades! That would be retarded! Instead, these fuel rods can be reprocessed and USED! Waste = fuel, get it? As for Simon saying “Until someone comes up with a solution, I just don’t think nuclear is viable, ” well, until he’s done some more reading on the EBR2 which was built in the 1960’s for crying out loud, and how it *uses* nuclear waste as fuel, I don’t think Simon’s TALK is viable!

He conflates declining energy with energy, but the declining energy is a myth. There’s only declining fossil energy: but splitting the atom contains *millions* of times as much energy as chemical energy we just burn. That’s where the EROEI for our civilisation will come from that maintains and replaces all the capital heavy infrastructure of nuclear power and electric transport and wasteful hydrogen systems.

The fact that Michaux completely bypasses the breeding of nuclear waste invalidates his talk, period. With enough energy we can mine even the lowest grade metals. With our civilisation lasting long enough, we’ll mine space and eventually have gifts raining down from the sky. On the other hand, if we fight over the remaining oil because we’re too stupid to see that a bright, proliferation free SAFE nuclear program is possible, then we could nuke ourselves back to the stone age. Which is one reason I dismiss doomer prophecies. They’re self-indulgent and self-fulfilling. But they are *not* inevitable. Nothing you have said here, none of the data you have contributed, dismisses the FACT that the EBR2 ran successfully for 30 years and it was built in the 1960’s!

[…] keep the old brain cells alive and ticking. For instance, when I pointed the conversation towards Simon Michaux’s Peak Mining presentation available on this blog, and that I thought mining without diesel would be impossible, along comes […]